Krukognia
by Krukognia
Summary: A young Polish girl is sent to a concentration camp in Germany in 1939, where she is called to her duty as a slayer.
1. Chapter 1

**Episode I : Called**

I've heard that most girls get called when they're in their teens. They have watchers, and they train, and they go out and find vampires and slay them. That's what a slayer does.

I'm a slayer.

But that isn't how it worked for me.

I don't know if I was just some random anomaly, called to my duty because I happened to get in the way of the ancient slayer power, or maybe the Powers That Be chose me out of the line because there was just too much evil in my world. Maybe I got called early so that I could help balance the scale in my little corner of Hell, but it just made the world into a bigger, badder Hell. I didn't have to find the evil. It found me before I was ever a chosen one and it just got worse. I was given the power to stop it, the strength to fight, but I was still just me and everyone around me was dying, suffering. If I hadn't been a slayer maybe I could've just died too. But I had to fight, and fail, alone, every day.

I was born September 14 1930 to a Polish family in Poznan. I suppose fate had me down from the start : while my family celebrated their first child, the Nazi party celebrated election. Despite the political tension, Poznan was a very charming place to grow up, and we shared the city with our German friends and neighbors without a second thought. My mother made clothes for Germans and Poles alike, Jews and Christians discussed the weather with my father when they came into our shop. My brother ran in the street with the other boys, and the matrons of the town all clamored to bounce the new baby girl on their knee. I was just a little girl. Poznan was home. Berlin was just spouting threats. For all I knew.

September 1 1939. The Nazis start their brutal campaign towards Warsaw. My beautiful town stood in fear as they terrorized my country, and we tried to figt back. Our army held them off for five days at the River Bzura, but my father fell, my uncle fell, my cousin fell, and our army failed. September 13, our men were lost and the Nazis had won. My ninth birthday was the first day without hope. Three days later the Soviets invaded; Warsaw fell, my country was given away in bits to the invading beasts, and my mother and I found ourselves in the mouth of Hell : Ravensbruck.

Ravensbruck was full of dry faces. Women arrived every day to join the hundreds of near-dead, walking dead, and already dead. As we were unloaded from the train and filed through the gates like a shipment of rotting meat an empty horror sunk in. This can't be life, I thought, as I looked up to my mother for reassurance. All I saw was a dry face. She held my hand and my little brother's, I held my baby sister, she didn't look at us. She didn't move as they took my brother. She didn't even look at the baby, just handed it from me to them. I wanted her to hold onto me, to say no, you can't have this one, but I was taken away and sent with the rest of the children.

You work here, they said.

We make the Jews and the Poles and the Scum useful.

You are children, you are not useful.

You see the fire, there you are useful.

You make heat.

I watched as tiny bodies were tossed to the crematory. The heat grew, it burned around me, it burned strong through me and inside me. The fire was so destructive and so strong, but I knew then I was stronger.

I could fight back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Episode II : Connected**

When you become a slayer, who you are changes. I didn't become less Polish, or less Jewish, or less myself, I became more. The Slayer line is about being connected. And disconnected. Suddenly I was part of this great ancient power, with new knowledge of girls before me who had been great warriors. I felt an amazing connection to these people whose names I didn't even know. Being in the camp was the same. We didn't even have names to know there, but we were all connected. Across Poland, the Poles were being persecuted and tortured together. Across the Europe, the Jewish community was strengthening our resolve to believe in our hearts. Across the world, the enemies of Evil were uniting.

But I was disconnected.

This evil, the evil the British were fighting, the evil that marched and fired guns and gassed naked men, this was just human. I was finding new evil every day, awake and in dreams, and the evil that terrorized me by day was nothing compared to the Evil I knew at night. This was a world that only I knew, and everyone around me spent their days in fear, yes, but also ignorance. There is too much bad in the world to take it all in, I don't even think they want to know what the're ignorant of. Do you?

I'll tell you what you don't want to know.

I was watching them burn the body of my baby sister. She had such fat legs, they sizzled. As the fire consumed her body, another fire consumed my heart. I ran forward screaming, every muscle in my body thrashing out to kick, hit, bite whatever it could reach. At the mouth of the oven a large arm reached out and a hand wrapped around my neck, lifted me off the floor. I felt the swing as the arm moved to hurl me in with the rest of the meat. I wouldn't be the one to crush my sister's disintegrating skull. My legs shot out for the wall as the hand released and I pushed back, leaping off the wall directly into the two massive bodies, two stoic faces, two vulnerable necks, two dead men. I killed them. With my hands. Twigs never snapped so easy.

Here's the thing about Nazis. There are always more Nazis. Two dead SS lay at my feet, three more came, then a surge behind them. And me? I ran. I ran and hid while they burned the rest of the children. I didn't know what it was like to kill men until then, and it turns out its not that easy. Even as they killed my people, my brother and sister and took away my mother I hated myself for killing just two evil men. That night I couldn't move, I just found a place to hide from those monsters and curled up and cried and slept. But there were more monsters.

_A young girl, maybe 15, Chinese. Everyone outside is running and yelling. There is fire, lots of fire. And beautiful silk. I can see this girl is different. No, I know it, I feel it. I remember what she was thinking. She was scared, but not because her city was burning, or because her family was dying. She was afraid of a man in her house. He was pale and gaunt and confident because he knew she would die. She fought with a stick; I felt its power as she held it, but it was just wood and he had...a weapon...teeth...The girl was strong and knew how to kill. I knew how to kill. But he was made to kill, and he grabbed her, and held her close to his body and I smelled the blood as he drank her power. I watched from the door as he walked past me and her body burned in her own house._

_I know her. Because she is why I'm here._

The girl died that night in China, and there was another like us, and another, on and on. All of these girls fought and died because there are monsters in the world. And here I was, Ravensbruck, living under monsters, hiding from them. These were different monsters. The monsters I knew weren't pale and gaunt. That was us, the Jews, the Poles. They had real weapons. All I had was a stick. But every girl who fought a monster knew the power in their hands, and all it took was a sharp piece of wood.

We know how to kill.


	3. Chapter 3

**Episode III : Practice**

Back then, in my first years in Ravensbruck, I didn't know what we were called. I didn't know there was a name for the chosen one, the girl with the strength to fight and kill evil things. I also didn't know there were rules against killing humans. But really, if I had, I wouldn't have done anything differently.

Lesson #1 : Practice makes perfect.

My first fight had lasted no more than five seconds and I had killed no more than two men. I knew that if I wanted to fight longer and harder and kill more men and be ready for the greater evil out there I had to work at it. Fortunately for me, I happened to be in the one place where I could get all the practice I needed. There are always more Nazis, right?

I started out by hiding and striking at them one at a time. Speed, thats important. If you can kill a man before he can call more men, no one knows you exist. Every night I found one or two or three alone, just standing, feeling safe and important and powerful. The more nights I spent in Hell the better I got. Soon, I saw them feeling less safe. They still had those powerful, important looks on their faces, but they weren't standing alone anymore. So I would kill two or three at a time. In one night, ten Nazis, dead.

Lesson #2 : Preparation makes effective.

In my dreams, the girls always fought with sticks. Sometimes they had knives or arrows, but always they carried sticks. Ravensbruck was full of sticks. One stick, sharpened to a point, can go straight through a man and kill him. Apparently if you put a stick through the heart of one of the monsters in my dreams, they turn to dust. Its a good skill to know in my line of work, and I embraced my destiny of sticks.

Surviving in Ravensbruck was a life of hiding, running from one place to the next, stealing, hoarding. Any child who survived the first few days knew this life. All over there were places no one knew about and only the smallest could get, and these became my treasure troves. No one misses sticks like they miss food or shoes, so by day I would gather them, sharpen them, and hide them. There was not one block without sticks, ready for me to strike through Nazi hearts.

Lesson #3 : Improvisation makes unstoppable.

As the weeks went on, I became intimately familiar with the feeling of a stick in my hand. I knew the amount of pressure it took to press through flesh, the space between ribs where it would strike true. But I saw the girls in my dreams, I felt their minds working to know death, and I wanted to know. How else can you kill a monster?

Hands. Rocks. Fire. Shoelaces around throats. Cloth stuffed down throats. Big cuts to the belly, small cuts to the wrists or necks. I even dreamed that sunlight would kill the monsters that turn to dust. As I sat waiting for the Nazis to come and die, I wished that they would walk into the sun and burst into flame, but my monsters were men. So I killed them every other way I could think of.

I may not have known that I was The Slayer, but I took my destiny to heart, and to the hearts of the evil men around me. Here in Ravensbruck, we had no names, we were creatures, nobodies - but I was not Nobody. I was special. So I gave myself a name, and in accepting the power of the line of girls that killed the monsters, I became Krukognia : Raven of Fire.


	4. Chapter 4

**Episode IV : Dying**

Everyone around me is dying.

Ravensbruck is a camp for women, but you wouldn't know it if you just walked in. There are no breasts. No one bleeds here to mark the passing months, they are all too withered.

A woman arrived carrying a baby in her belly and they beat it out of her. She is not a woman anymore, she is just dead.

The thing that makes me strong and gives me dreams also makes me alive. My wounds heal, and my limbs stay fleshed and my mind stays sharp. Most of the children who make it through the first day hide until they starve to death. Not me. I thrive in all this death.

My nightly stalking was lit by a waxing moon. Sallow faces sat at windows hoping they wouldn't wake up in the morning. I was looking for the healthy, the pink cheeked and straight backed, and at first I didn't see her. Then a chill, and I paused : behind me. I turned my face the slightest bit into the moonlight and pulled my eyes around to see what moved. The face was white and sunk into itself. I thought it was one of us, a moslem, walking dead. But that chill was forbidding and my heart raced like it knew. In my invincibility I had almost forgotten fear, but that night I was nowhere near invincible.

The white creature leapt from the shadows, teeth bared in a mutilated face. The moon caught every facet of her grotesqueness and reflected it into me. Looking into its eyes, I saw myself, my purpose, my every ounce of fear rushing back to where it had once resided, expelled through false displays of superiority. I had not known Evil until this moment. The beast had power running hot within its body. I had none.

It caught me by the arm as I shot for my stick, holding me back with more strength than I could imagine. I fought against it, my mind racing to the memories I had seen. Dust, dust, kill it and it will all be dust, it can't hurt you. But it was just too much. She turned me with a flick of her wrist and held me tightly, close, so I could feel her coldness. She turned my head to the moon and I gave myself to its brightness as I felt the release : hard, sharp teeth tearing delicately into my neck, my body pulsing for her.

I cried in the quietness of blood seeping out. I thought that fate wanted me. I thought I was good, I was helping. But I did it wrong. I was bad, I was a monster no different from this beast. Killing things. Killing people. And she came to let me know that there was no destiny for me left.

I, invincible, was dying.

A small cry made my heart beat. A tiny noise, in a corner, brought me back from my despairing thoughts, a shimmer of blackpool eyes sent a surge through me of hot blood and I found my strength. A girl hiding, knowing that she was the next to break. So I fought. If not to protect myself, I would fight to protect her. I felt wood in my hand, and it knew its strength, it found its place. Home, deep in a dry barren heart. Dust.

This child, dark hair, dark skin, wild eyes, had survived. She had gotten this far, she had come to cower and shake but in her fear she found a voice and gave my new monster a name. "Mullo."

I didn't tell you before, I suppose I should. I killed a woman at her post. She wasn't SS, just a camp guard. She wasn't brutal like them, just superior. Blonde. As I held her by the throat she cried and told me her daughter was in the barracks. Sleeping. She needed to kiss her daughter good night. No one kisses daughters here. Her last kiss was from me as I dove deep into her body. Sternum cracked. Splinters bit at her veins. Her heart stained the wood which had cut so many open.

Her body didn't turn to dust, but I watched as her tears dried and blew away.

***I know this ep feels incomplete and moves awkwardly, but I figured I'd go ahead and post so that I get your feedback on where you feel the holes. I like the disconnect, but I still want it to have the right motion.


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